Israeli Cabinet Approves Netanyahu's Gaza Takeover Plan

Bloomberg

3 days ago

00:00
Israel's security cabinet has approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plans to take full control of Gaza City. The move is seen as a final push to topple Hamas and 22 months of fighting in Gaza. Netanyahu told Fox News Channel he intends to hand over Gaza's governance to Arab forces. Well, we don't want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don't want to govern it. We don't want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to our forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving Gazans a good life. That's not possible with Hamas. Let's go to Jerusalem now and speak to Bloomberg's Don Williams. So the Israeli prime minister is describing this as a military operation, not an occupation. And yet Israel still effectively controls around 70% of the Gaza Strip. Why this latest push into Gaza City done? To hear the Israelis tell it, it's the end, or at least the beginning of the end of this war. Israel's longest of Hamas, at least in terms of Hamas being an armed governing group in the Gaza Strip. It's worth noting that this war really has been a strain on Israel's conscript military, on its economy. It's plunged Palestinians in Gaza into unprecedented humanitarian distress, and it's tested the patience even of Israel's best friends abroad in the region, in Western Europe and the United States. So it would appear now that the two choices were either for Israel to capitulate in terms of giving up on its Cold War goals, of retrieving the 50 hostages while eliminating Hamas, or to press ahead into this last patch of Gaza land in order to crush Hamas militarily. Now, there was a ten hour cabinet meeting that took place, which tells you that the meeting itself was pretty fraud. But I want to ask you about broader Israeli public opinion. It was notable this week that the Israeli, a former Israeli military chief, actually cautioned against pushing further militarily into the Gaza Strip. You had the leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, yesterday saying most of the nation is in behind you. The people of Israel don't want this war. We will bear heavy costs for it. How is this likely to go down amongst the Israeli public? Not well for at least six months now. Polls have shown that a majority of Israelis want the war ended with a negotiated deal to return the hostages, even if that means leaving Hamas standing. That's in stark opposition to what Netanyahu and his religious nationalist government have been pursuing here. The prime minister has written off those poll findings saying they're either inaccurate or that Israelis don't understand the implications, the ramifications of leaving Hamas around. This is an organization which is deemed a terrorist group by much of the West. It began this war with an attack on Israel that was Israel's worst, in fact, the worst the bloodiest day for Jews since World War Two. There's a matter here not just of national security, but also of national honor in terms of finishing the war where it began, Netanyahu can claim to have seriously set back Hamas allies in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, But we're now back to Gaza to square one. And he seems determined to be able to declare victory there. Yeah. Despite a lot of pressure from the international community, something that we've been talking about on this show the last few weeks, the real push out of many European states and other countries around the world to move towards the recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly come September. But the big one is the US. And the question here is, does Netanyahu have the explicit or even the implicit support of the United States for this operation? I know you spoke to the US ambassador to Israel earlier this week. Indeed, I would say it's explicit. Trump himself has said he's fed up with Hamas. He's expressed horror at the treatment of the hostages as 50 hostages, or at least the 20, he believes still are still alive in Hamas captivity. And indeed, the Americans appear to have built up a kind of tag team relationship with Israel, whereby Israel does the fighting and the United States does the feeding. What I mean by that is there is this new substitute humanitarian aid system in Gaza known as the F. It had a tricky rollout. There have been issues with safety for aid seekers and now it appears the Americans want to quadruple its output in concert with the Israeli moves into the remaining 25% of the Gaza Strip. So we can expect to see civilians that are evacuated or dislocated from Gaza, from Gaza City being invited to new Jewish centers to be tended to, at least when it comes to staple foods and the like, something the allies hope will allow will smooth over what's found to be a very, very rough patch of this war.